Friday, July 31, 2015

Empire to Double Down on Doctrine

Gozanti-class carrier deploying a standard flight of TIE fighters.

IMPERIAL CENTER (CORUSCANT) - With recent successes in the Arkanis sector, the admiralty of the Imperial Navy has decided to invest further into the order-of-battle doctrine that has proven to be so successful. According to reports, the Imperial Navy will deploy long-range deployment vehicles for its standard flights of TIE fighters, rather than using Special Operations formations employed by Moff Dzon Brennin of the Arkanis Sector.

While the Corellian Engineering Corporation-designed Gozanti-class armed transport has long been employed as an armored freighter, the Imperial has been experimenting with fixing a standard flight of four TIE-fighters to the ventral surfaces of its wings, allowing the modest-size craft to transport the TIE fighters through hyperspace into territories distant from Imperial garrisons without the need to redeploy valuable capital ships.

Imperial strategists deem the Gozanti carrier to be ideal for far-flung places of the Outer Rim, such as the Arkanis sector. It would make obsolete the 'Special Operations Units' currently deployed to Arkanis, invalidating Moff Brennin's approach to rooting out the crime wave by unorthodox means.

Moff Brennin's apologists object, claiming that the Special Operations Units were not merely a response to the economy of not having to deploy capital-scale carriers and weapons platforms, but were also an insightful tactic against the nature of the syndicate threat of the Arkanis sector. However, with those Special Operations Units failing to wipe out the criminal threat infesting his sector, Moff Brennin has fallen in disfavor in the Imperial capital. The disfavor comes in the wake of a number of successes by sorties of TIE fighters and bombers flying in standard formations of four and two, respectively.

The Imperial Order of Battle for naval aviation is organized into wings of seventy-two units, consisting of six squadrons of twelve fighters/bombers, and each squadron consisting of three flights of four, and each flight of four consisting of an element of two fighters/bombers. The Special Operations Units, by contrast, were deployed in an ad hoc fashion, frequently consisting of two dissimilar units or sometimes three platforms.

Moff Dzon Brennin, a former Imperial Intelligence officer, designed the use of the special Operations Units to respond to the highly irregular formations employed by the crime syndicates as well as the Rebel Alliance.